Restoring History: Creating WoW Classic Panel
- What's Under the Hood?
- Database Data
- Art Assets
- Source Code
- They kept track of everything in a repository that kept track of all changes made to the game.
- This repository has been keeping track of changes since 1997.
- First bug fix tracked - April 25, 1997.
- Two versions of the game in database - live and development.
- The development data was created over the live version. Eventually they changed it so that the team could work on multiple patches at a time.
- Art Assets include 3D models and textures which combine to in-game models.
- In digging back into the database, they discovered that they only had art assets from recent expansions.
- They found a backup with another backup folder that housed some old art assets.
- The old WoW didn't -
- Run in the Blizzard Cloud
- No battle.net desktop app
- No login servers
- No customer support access
- Every bug, exploit and hack re-activated.
- The team decided to layer the old version on the modern tech to solve this issue.
- However, the new source code didn't know how to load the old data.
- They eventually created a prototype that used the 7.3.5 client with the old data implemented. Combat wasn't quite there but you could still learn abilities from trainers and other long lost parts of vanilla.
- When you ventured outside of areas unaffected by the Cataclysm and into zones that were affected you saw weird things like missing water, aquatic creatures on land and terrestial creatures underwater. There was also armor that was untextured and so on.
- Feeding the modern engine the 1.12 engine doesn't read perfectly. Certain object placements are off which leads to trees flying in the air and stuff like the shattered Loch Modan damn still holding back water.
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